Movers and shakers who chose to attend Roland Rudd’s 50th birthday party on Saturday night instead of George Osborne’s 40th celebration were rewarded with some amusing jokes at the expense of the well-connected “spin doctor”.

Simon Kelner, a newspaper editor, produced a spoof front page featuring Rudd, the founder of Finsbury consultancy, whose clients have included Nat Rothschild and his controversial Russian chum Oleg Deripaska.

“Revealed: Rudd’s Soviet years”, screamed the headline, above a photograph of the PR man in front of an Aeroflot aeroplane. “The spy who came in from the cold”.

Let’s hope that Kelner’s boss, the former KGB operative Alexander Lebedev, who owns a third of Aeroflot, is tickled.